How online scalpers are changing the New Year train ticket rush

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It is already incredibly hard to buy a train ticket to travel back home from the city you work in during the Spring Festival period, which will start in late January and end in early February this year.

On the official ticket booking website 12306, nearly every train departing from Beijing or Shanghai is labeled as sold out.

But here comes the solution for people who missed out in the great annual ticket battle.

Several Internet companies invested in phone applications and similar online programs which automatically detect available tickets and book them almost instantly. As long as you input your information, the program will renew the ticket system constantly and find the ticket for you.

These platforms claim to be authorized by the 12306 website, but the Beijing Railway Customer Service denied that it cooperates with any other third party companies.

An anonymous programmer told the Yangtse Evening News that computers run faster than human beings when it comes to navigating the ticket booking system.

Does it work? Eventually it might, but usually only after you've paid extra money for the service, again and again.

Each regular user may be waiting for a ticket with another 20,000 people in the system. But once you pay for it, you may enter a “VIP room” where less people are waiting, and you have a higher chance of grabbing that ticket home.

“This is an endless investment. You can never know if the application works or not,” a customer surnamed Chen said in the interview with Yangtse Evening News.

But is it a legal platform? There has been criticism of these programs, calling them ticket scalpers of the digital age.

According to national regulations on reselling train tickets, qualified travel agencies are allowed to charge five yuan for each ticket. Train tickets are seen as limited public resources, and not freely tradable commodities. Charging for resold tickets should be qualified, otherwise their sale can be defined as an illegal operation.